The horsemeat scandal has become an object lesson in how our food supply can be literally corrupted, with no one less than organized crime and the Italian and Polish mafia in particular, pointed to. Horsemeat could carry traces of phenylbutazone or “bute,” a drug given to racehorses to relieve pain and treat fevers, so consumers may have gotten a sprinkling of something besides oregano in their frozen entrees.

As a result, a number of European supermarkets have withdrawn products containing processed meat from their shelves. European Union agricultural ministers are meeting in Brussels to address what has become a growing scandal. French public health officials have called in representatives from the meat industry for crisis talks. Both U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Environment Secretary Owen Paterson have both said that nothing less than the “full force of the law” will be visited upon any British business found to have defrauded the public by selling horse meat labelled as beef.

For all this, public health officials contend that eating horse meat carries no real risks to health. Indeed, Paterson has emphasized that the horse meat scandal is, most of all, about fraud in the form of deceptive packaging of food products.

The problem is that bute can have side effects in human beings. It was once given to men and women to tackle conditions such as gout and arthritis until it was discovered that in some cases the chemical can trigger a serious blood disorder known as aplastic anaemia. Those who become affected by the condition suffer from loss of red and white blood cells and, without prompt treatment, it is considered to be life-threatening. As a result, phenylbutazone was banned as a medication for humans by drug authorities on both sides of the Atlantic several decades ago.

Food safety professor Chris Elliott of Queens University, Belfast, emphasizes that, from eating any of the suspected items, one is only going to get one-millionth of the amount of phenylbutazone that a horse injected with the medication would. The real health hazard is, he points out, from the amount of fats and salt in the processed food products found to contain horse meat.

This is true; processed foods from the freezer case prepared somewhere else are about as far as you can get from meals from fresh, local ingredients. The horse meat scandal has not only become an object lesson in the endemic problems of today’s food industry. Like recent reports about horses slaughtered before each others’ eyes in British abattoirs, Europe’s horse meat scandal is an indictment of public health agencies who talk about standards while still allowing the wrong substances to get into the food chain.

Thanks for subscribing!

GREAT STORY, RIGHT?

Share it with your friends

281 comments

LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK

OR SIGN IN WITH CARE2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_meat
hundreds of thousands of horses are slaughtered world wide, it is probably in many processed foods. read your pet food label. if it says MEAT and not what meat it could be horse, road kill, euthanized pets, skinned fur bearing corpses, crippled, dying and diseased animals. do you not think some of these refuse animals sneak into the human food chain? cause they do....

Most of the world is really overreacting about this "horse meat scandal".
They are either terrified by the thought that their meat is poisoned, and destroy tons of suspicious meat, even when there is no real evidence about its toxicity; or, they act like eating cows is fine and eating horses is wrong.
Medical check-ups of the animals being slaughtered would have avoided this mess. If the horses come from racing, don't kill them, period. If you really have to eat them (which is like eating a dog, given horses' intelligence), eat the ones living in farms.
People and industries don't check where their meat comes from, and then they act surprised when they discover they are eating garbage.